SPENCER: Swipe at Obama unfair to elitist hyprocrites

She recently wrote President Obama a letter asking him to help protect her friends and neighbors.

"Even though I am not scared for my own safety, I am scared for others," she wrote. "My opinion is it should be very hard for people to buy guns ... I beg you to work very hard to make guns not allowed, not just for me, but for the whole United States."

Julia's letter was released to the media by the White House on the same day the president surrounded himself with children to promote his ideas to make America safer from gun violence.

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Now, Julia is too young to know it, but not so very long ago the city in which she lives actually made "guns not allowed."

The year was 1976 and the elected officials of Washington, D.C., decided to make it against the law for anyone other than cops to own a handgun. The idea, of course, was that if guns were made illegal, fewer people would get shot and killed.

The law allowed some civilians to keep their guns, but only so long as they were kept in pieces or trigger-locked. And those civilians were not allowed to remove the trigger locks even if the homeowner was being robbed at gunpoint.

Oddly, the effect of this new law was not very good. Violent crime went up instead of going down. The murder rate went up from 188 in 1976 to 369 in 1988. Five years after that, it reached 454.

Clearly, there was something wrong with the new law. It certainly proved the old saw that if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns. In disarming law-abiding citizens, the law emboldened criminals. Muggers, burglars and other bad guys knew the likelihood of an intended victim being able to defend himself or his property had been substantially diminished.

None of this mattered to the elected officials who enacted the ban in the first place. They blamed the lack of stringent gun control laws elsewhere for the failure of their own ban.

It wasn't until 2007 that D.C.'s gun ban was found to be unconstitutional and overturned by a federal appeals court. Since then, the D.C. homicide rate has been cut in half.

Will restricting the size of ammunition magazines and closing the gun show loophole do the job? Well, maybe marginally. Even the National Rifle Association supports background checks at gun shows. But its hard to see how limiting the size of bullet clips will stop a determined mass murderer from getting his hands on a larger magazine if he really wants one. These things are so simple to make now that they can be downloaded onto 3D printers at home. Besides, even guns with 10-shot magazines can be reloaded in two seconds or less.

Most of these policy suggestions are mere bait for the anti-gun crowd.

After 9/11, America spent billions to make air travelers safe from terrorist attacks. But the creation of the Transportation Safety Administration was more about creating more government union jobs than it was about making air travel actually safer.

It was much more effective to go after America's enemies hatching these plots in faraway lands. (Too bad there's no way for this president to authorize a drone attack on the next homegrown mass murderer before he strikes.)

The NRA's Wayne LaPierre and the president also seem to agree that hiring more armed guards to protect public schools is a good idea.

LaPierre advocates hiring cops for every public school in America. It's a dumb, unnecessary and ridiculously expensive idea. There are right around 100,000 public schools in America. Just hiring two guards per school at say, $50,000 in salary and benefits would cost $10 billion a year.

Our skinflint president is only suggesting the hiring of 1,000 "resource officers" to protect "our kids." But that leaves 99,000 schools to fend for themselves.

As I've said before, to the extent that the people who run these schools believe the threat of a armed madman is real significant enough to warrant armed protection, allowing teachers to carry firearms strikes me as a much more cost-effective way to protect children. It doesn't surprise me that more and more school districts across the country are pursuing this course of action.

For his own part, the president sends his own children to a exclusive private school that has its own very well-trained security force.

Pointing this out, however, is declared by the White House to be highly offensive.

"Repugnant and cowardly," is how the president's press secretary, Jay Carney, characterized an ad from the NRA.

"Most Americans agree that a president's children should not be used as pawns in a political fight," Carney wrote.

But it is fine for this president to use other people's children as political props to further a policy agenda that he favors.

The NRA described Mr. Obama as an "elitist hypocrite."

That's unfair. To elitist hypocrites.

The White House accuses the NRA of "ginning up fear" among gun owners that the government is coming for their guns, while the president uses children to promote the latest in lame policy prescriptions to "end the violence."

It's almost enough to move a grown-up to write a letter to God, begging him to make this sort of silliness "not allowed."

Gil Spencer's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Check out his spencerblog every day at delcotimes.com.